The Flaming Lips – At War With the Mystics

FLAMING LIPS NEW ALBUM

Wayne's voice is totally shot, though. :(

i love 'fanatical' to pieces... and the whole thing, really.

One of the worst songs I've heard in years.

Like everyone else said, did you want the same album or something different ?

I think this is pretty accessable for a Lips album, and has the potential to do pretty well for them, among new fans.

Also, I thionk "Mr Ambulance Driver" and "The Wand" make more sense in the context of the album than by themselves. Thank god.

I really liked it except for the actual "yeah yeah yeah" hook, which is horrible.

-- cdwill (use...), February 12th, 2006.

I have to say that "The W.A.N.D." has grown on me a little. The rest can fuck off.

This looks like a either love or hate album. Glad that I'm not insane for liking it so far.

I wouldn't want them to keep making the same album over and over.

Anyway i'll reserve judgement on it until ive heard it a few more times. I might wait until it comes out though and see how it sounds on cd.

Then count me in the camp that broke out Soft Bulletin today just to make sure that, at some point, the Flaming Lips were exciting. I wasn't so sure after going through AWWTM a couple times today.

Let me ask this: let's say I got burnt out on The Soft Bulletin, and I never bothered with Yoshimi... because I was really bored with what i've heard from it, but I'd still happily listen to Clouds Taste Metallic...

Would this album possibly be enjoyable to me? Or is this totally different than anything they've done before?

is the "yeah yeah yeah" song have any relation to the Alice Cooper song of the same title, or Disco Tex And The Sex-o-lettes' "Get Dancin'" per chance?

The best rock band of the last 15 years.

I am not a typical Lips fan - a great fan of their singles ("Realize", "Jelly"), and of their live show, but someone who never puts on their records. But this is at least initially marvellous.

This chatter is amazing! More please ;-)

work please!

But go anyway. I would if I lived in Edinburgh.

I wonder what happened when Oasis played there..

"Goin' On" is nice too.

i thought i'd share. and better here than in gmail chat. i'm getting creeped out by the idea of knowing whenever you or anyone else is logged into gmail!

That said, the arrogant tone of voice you're getting in your head is probably not far from the truth.

re arrogant tone of voice. ha!

Dang, I knew I should have snapped up tickets as soon as they were announced. Why can't they play Glasgow? Their Barrowlands show of 3 years ago was a beautiful, beautiful experience. Maybe they'll get here when the tour comes back round again later in the year.
I'll still go to Edinburgh though. The Usher Hall is a gorgeous venue and not so big that the balcony will feel like being miles away.

Midway through my first listen I suddenly blurted out "this is their A Wizard, A True Star."

I like it, but I'm not sold on the sequencing at all.

There's some filler - but "The Sound Of Failure / It's Dark...Is It Always This Dark??" and "Vein Of Stars" are two of their most beautiful songs. "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" and "Free Radicals" took some getting used to, but now they make me smile.

Superb.

I wish I had a timelapse video, maybe a picture every 5 seconds, of my girlfriend and I listening to the new "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song". Mind you, we're both huge fans, and had great expectations for At War With the Mystics.

0:00 - heads close to the speakers, smiling faces
0:05 - girlfriend: "are you sure this is the right cd?" me: "just keep listening"
0:10 - no more smiles. my right eyebrow rises.
0:15 - me: "yeah, maybe this is one of those fake album leaks..."
0:20-2:30 - What the fuck?
2:35 - me: god, this is the single? Why is it so long?
2:40 - her: it's only been a few minutes. try the next song.

"Free Radicals" - same exact thing.
The rest of the album isn't quite as embarassing, thankfully.
I agree with what said Mr. Snrub above. I haven't even thought about playing it again since that first day. I listened to it 3 times in a row, and then never again.

os mutantes
-- La Monte (lamont...), April 5th, 2006.

OTM!

zachary - those two songs are perhaps my favourite Lips tracks EVER!

-- AaronHz,

You mean this one? :-)

http://www3.youtube.com/watch?v=LNLJfb6jQVk

Revive. This is a very dense record.

Their least-interesting (dare i say "worst"?) record since Telepathic Surgery

I think it's underrated. A few less slow songs and I think people would've loved it.

If it was listenable I might be able to form an opinion beyond "unlistenable".

The production is magnificent and maximalist.

Perhaps, but the mastering is absolutely atrocious.

Telepathic Surgery shits all over this.

I'm still convinced I heard a bizarro world version. Reading through these comments, I'm struck by the disparate descriptions of the general tone of the album, sometimes even among the same listeners. Sean called it "compressed Martian pop music", and then later "just a breezy pop vibe... rather than concentrated pop pow." To me, it AWWTM seems like the result of an experiment where you stick a band with a reputation for producing extravagant pop landscapes overloaded with textures, and stick them in a studio when they're at their creative nadir. I think I like the songs on Yoshimi and Soft Bulletin more because I can picture them being stripped down in their instrumentation, while managing to still sound good. I can't imagine the songs on AWWTM sounding very good in a stripped down setup. They just aren't good songs in the first place.

telepathic surgery < at war with the mystics < the rest of the lips' discography

i like telepathic surgery. but i like this one too, so...yeah.

Many high points, but many low ones. The first two songs are inexcusable.

Hilarious how little consensus there is for this. The people who like it do so conditionally, some hate it barring a song or two, others despite it without reservation. I admire how overstuffed it is. The bgd vox on most of it are unprecedented-sounding -- almost as if they stole the voices Eno used on Music For Airports, edited them to sing soul and doo-wop, and ran them through a broken Revox.

The idea that there aren't songs here is misguided. But there's no question that the lot of it is willfully disjointed -- "The Sound of Failure" takes these smooth melodies and maj-9 chords you might find on, say, The Royal Scam and hacks them to pieces with a production you might find on an emo record before ending with one of the Lips' patented Cecil-B.-DeMille-Does-Akira orchestral codas. On the whole, the production sounds extremely live one moment full of Drozd/Bonham drum pounding and utterly artificial and studio-fied the next. But to Nick's point, I think it's intentional, not simply bad mastering.

Though, in fairness, I'd hate to have been the mastering engineer on this one.

I don't doubt that it's intentional (Friddman mastered it); I just think it's fucking disgusting.

But ask yourself why it might be intentional and the disgust changes, I think.

the producer and the mastering engineer are the same person

http://www.discogs.com/release/657355

of all the records Nick could have chosen to lead his 'imperfect sound forever' article, I think this was an unfortunate choice that slightly undercuts his argument, because the sound of this particular record was obviously intentional. the second it started, you could tell it was engineered that way, you might not like it, but it was a sound they were going for, not inflicted at the final stage by a stranger

xpost well there you go. still nick... you're going to need a stronger argument than the fact that you don't like it if it's what they meant to do

This thread made me pop this in again. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion" is fuckin' BALLS AWESOME.

It's all in the Hammond on that one.

"The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small... Do I Stand A Chance?"

=

worst title ever.

I didn't 'pick' AWWTM as the lead album for ISF so much as it was the last in a line of several albums that made me aware of the issue, and research on it made me aware that I wasn't the only person who had issue with it. It was a matter of convenient timing, really.

I also don't think it's an issue that the sound of it is deliberate; in fact I think it adds to my point. I was very clear in stating in ISF that flat-lining wasn't an issue forced on poor, hapless musicians by evil record company people and nasty mastering engineers; having spoken to lots of mastering engineers about it, the source of the problem a lot of the time was the musicians themselves. I just think that as a technique or an aesthetic, it is a horrible, misguided, wrongheaded one that doesn't achieve what it wants to achieve. Clipping the hell out of a record doens't make it sound radical; it masks radicalness, if anything. AWWTM sounds like the last Keane record, whereas the Guillemots album, uncompressed and unclipped, sounds radical next to both of them, stands out as different and strange and atypical. At this stage in recorded music instruments that sound real are more shocking, more thrilling, more radical, than instruments that sound unreal. The Flaming Lips, despite the radicalness of the arrangements on AWWTM, end up sinking into the background hum of everyday life rather than demanding attention; surely that's not what they wanted, to be as inconsequential as the twinklytwinkly polished AOR ballad shit they play on UK local radio every Sunday morning?

Lots of people have meant to do lots of things in art; deliberation of artistic intention doesn't negate disagreement with whether it was right or not. Meaning it (and "meaning it, maaaaaan" too, for that matter) doens't make it beyond criticism. I'd self-identify as someone who likes the Flips, but I have hated their last two records because of the alienating production they've employed. I physically can't listen to AWWTM without getting a headache very quickly. The fact that they've done that deliberately rather than having it forced on them actually makes me more pissed off about it.

The Menomena album does something similar, with weird, compressed production at times rather than open-wide naturalness, and does it much, much better to my ears / mind.

"The Lips work on the concept that, ideally, their CDs aren't mastered. They want their final mix to BE the CD. This was the case with Zaireeka and Yoshimi, but not with the Soft Bulletin (don't know about Mystics). This was explained to me by bassist and engineer Michael Ivins when I interviewed him for Tape-Op magazine."

Lots of people have meant to do lots of things in art; deliberation of artistic intention doesn't negate disagreement with whether it was right or not.

I would never suggest their intent was beyond your criticism. But if you want a rock-solid argument, it's important to distinguish between the records that are being damaged by engineers and the artists who are actively involved in going for a new sound. Granted some of the musicians themselves might be just as guilty of cloth-eared L2 limited abuse, but there are a few recent pop records which achieved an amazing if relentless sound with compression / limiting, people who know what they're doing

I agree that uncompressed sound with a full dynamic range is a far more radical move in 2007 than the current brickwall competition

Hearing a Pro Tools metronone at the beginning of "The Sound of Failure" - dud.

Instantly dating your album by namedropping Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani - also dud.

Ripping off Meddle - classic!

Instantly dating your album by namedropping Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani - also dud.

Disagree. Think a big part of this record is in how America conflates celebrity with power right now.

this album sounds like shit.

I've been tempted to shell out the thirty bucks for the vinyl in the hopes that the masterning job is totally different and better, but common sense has thankfully prevailed each time.

I found the vinyl of this for 18 bucks today, and, apart from the glorious packaging (see through red vinyl! see through blue vinyl!) the record sounds so, so much better. I wish I had Nick in the room with me to see what he would think.